ght degree of activity, and the
expedients by which advancing communities endeavour to overcome them
form the staple of the history of Property. Of such expedients there
is one which takes precedence of the rest from its antiquity and
universality. The idea seems to have spontaneously suggested itself to
a great number of early societies, to classify property into kinds.
One kind or sort of property is placed on a lower footing of dignity
than the others, but at the same time is relieved from the fetters
which antiquity has imposed on them. Subsequently, the superior
convenience of the rules governing the transfer and descent of the
lower order of property becomes generally recognised, and by a gradual
course of innovation the plasticity of the less dignified class of
valuable objects is communicated to the classes which stand
conventionally higher. The history of Roman Property Law is the
history of the assimilation of Res Mancipi to Res Nec Mancipi. The
history of Property on the European Continent is the history of the
subversion of the feudalised law of land by the Romanised law of
moveables; and, though the history of ownership in England is not
nearly completed, it is visibly the law of personalty which threatens
to absorb and annihilate the law of realty.

The only _natural_ classification of the objects of enjoyment, the
only classification which corresponds with an essential difference in
the subject-matter, is that which divides them into Moveables and
Immoveables. Familiar as is this classification to jurisprudence, it
was very slowly developed by Roman law, from which we inherit it, and
was only finally adopted by it in its latest stage. The
classifications of Ancient Law have sometimes a superficial
resemblance to this. They occasionally divide property into
categories, and place immoveables in one of them; but then it is found
that they either class along with immoveables a number of objects
which have no sort of relation with them, or else divorce them from
various rights to which they have a close affinity. Thus, the Res
Mancipi of Roman Law included not only land, but slaves, horses, and
oxen. Scottish law ranks with land a certain class of securities, and
Hindoo law associates it with slaves. English law, on the other hand,
parts leases of land for years from other interests in the soil, and
joins them to personalty under the name of chattels real. Moreover,
the classifications of Ancient Law are clas